It was the week before the Grand Faire and the fairgrounds quivered with anticipation. Raise your hand if you paused in the middle of that word. Yep, there’s always a few of you. The Grand Faire comprises all aspects of fairs, festivals, carnivale, flea markets, and the Mos Eisley Cantina Scene. It’s a brightly colored, deep fried and sugar coated, all bells and whistles, step right up sort of whizbang show. The groups that make it roughly divide by genre, although that doesn’t stop daring acts from trying the profitable waters of the no man’s land between traditional styles. The burlesque acts spread particularly wide. It makes sense, nakedness is about as contagious as the predictable plagues that crop up every year: the flu, mono, smallpox, the clap, bronchitis, pink eye, you know, the usual.
Now the week before, that’s a special time. All the performers are there, the sets are being finished, the elephants watered, but there’s no patrons yet. Which means things can get a little wild. The grounds are mostly family friendly in the daytime, as long as you mind the signage and don’t mind the showgirls flashing a bit of thigh. Of course, once the good little boys and girls are in bed, the naughty ones get to have fun. This year, the after hours party got a bit out of hand. Someone decided it would be fun to have sex on top of the tiger cage and got a nasty case of cat scratch fever someplace rude. A newer group camped out on the border of Steampunk territory and the Society for Creative Anachronism managed to build a functional aether gun. Impressively, they did it while drunk off their asses on Romulan Ale smuggled across the antique dealer’s zone in a vintage cooler painted with Undark by some now-dead Radium Girl. A dancer on a cyr wheel got into a fight with an aerial silks artist and the two rendered themselves mutually unable to perform solo. They did manage to work it out and started a new act at the last minute. The new act was very good, although it required a temporary ceasefire at the paintball war grounds to let five circus strong men move them to the black leather tents of the exotically erotic shows.
The fun came to an abrupt end with the intervention of a government agency that preferred to remain nameless. Men in dark suits with neat haircuts varying only an inch in length swarmed the grounds, taking samples of drinks and food and grease paint. A large plane landed and disgorged a troop of identical GI Joes rendered in life size, with realistic coloration, and the steampunk inventors were escorted away while pointed questions were asked about things like permits, and the fairground manager got deeply uncomfortable looks on his faces. It was the last great hurrah of the Grand Faire, and you really had to have been there.
“Why is there lingonberry jam in the fridge?” Steve asked, standing in the glow of cold air and eyeing the jar in question skeptically.
Jane looked up from planning the menu for their next seven degrees party, a family gathering bringing in seven degrees of separation from their own pairing. “Because I bought lingonberry jam? Please tell me you’re not one of those people who stores jam at room temperature.”
“No, of course not!” Steve scoffed. He pulled out the yogurt he’d opened the fridge for in the first place, and leaned against the kitchen counter to eat it. “So where did you get lingonberry jam?”
“They sell it at IKEA,” Jane said, still deep in the intricacy of accommodating food restrictions. “You know, in that little grocery section past the checkout. Impulse buy, but totally worth it.”
“When did you go to IKEA? I would have helped you bring home whatever it was.”
“It’s fine, I went with Gary. He needed a shower curtain and I needed a new desk chair for my office.”
“Desk chair?”
“Yeah, I got a Skjoor… Skör,” Jane trailed off on the word, weighing the benefits of continuing to try to say it. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. It’s all one piece, and it looks nice. You wanna go up to my office and take a look?”
“One piece, huh?” Steve said smugly, a wry grin at the edge of his lips. He’d been caught fair and square, but he didn’t mind.
“Well, yeah,” Jane said, standing to give him a hug and a peck on the cheek. “I love Gary, but I needed a chair right then, and he’s not my handyman boyfriend. But... I saw a really pretty shelving unit while I was there.”
“You want to go to IKEA?”
“So, when did it start?” the detective asked. It wasn’t a harsh question, was actually asked in a light and friendly tone, even. Mallory had to chuckle at that, considering her position.
“Well, I mean, it obviously started when the faery walls came down. When we got magic back, and all that came with it. But as for what I think you want to know… it started with the gnomes.”
The gnomes had been a surprise, honestly. So many things that came sideways from the sun weren’t anything like they’re prettied up modern image. Elves were warriors, pixies a menace, and the unicorns… no, nothing seemed to be the same. Then, Mallory found gnomes in her trash cans. Cute, tiny, in pointed hats and velvet coats, like living garden statues trying to equitably divide pizza crusts. Obviously, she couldn’t just let them go on starving on scraps, so she pulled out all the leftovers the four housemates had, heated it up, and laid out a little buffet for them. They were grateful, and in exchange, willing to help with the gopher infestation Mallory had been fighting for ages. It turned out, however, that gnomes talk, and that’s how it escalated to other magical misfits, to an organized circle of favors that might, allegedly, be somewhat resembling organizations like the Mafia.
But it started with the gnomes.
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